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Sony Computer Entertainment's PlayStation Plus service began as the company's answer to Microsoft's Xbox Live, but the consumers have come to love the service in its own right. Who doesn't love the free games PS Plus offers monthly for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita? With the PlayStation 4 coming this year, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe president Jim Ryan told the official EU Playstation blog that PS Plus is a "core part" of the company's strategy moving forward.

"We're very happy with the service that we've been able to offer with PS Plus," said Ryan. "It's been really well received - the value is quite extraordinary and the take-up has trebled over the course of the past year. We definitely see that as a core part of the way forward. We're not yet in a position to disclose our plans for the future of PlayStation Plus, but there will definitely be a prominent role to play for it in the PlayStation 4 landscape."

Sony senior vice president of Worldwide Studios Michael also explained that the company is looking to bring more indie developers into the PlayStation family.

"It's always been part of our remit to offer different and unexpected experiences, and often the indie community thinks in those sorts of terms," said Denny.

"From a first party perspective we have an external development studio that's always reaching out to new start-ups and new innovators. People forget Media Molecule were just four guys when they first came to us with an idea. And that goes on all the time - not just in the UK, but throughout Europe as well. There are lots of new teams coming through. We're always looking for new teams with big ideas and big ambitions."

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4 Comments

In my opinion PSN+ is potentially Sony's biggest advantage in the next gen war, particularly since PS3 games aren't backwards compatible. Hopefully they'll not only keep the free games initiative but will also add something else really cool for the people who are subscribers.

I had never used PS+ before, until I recieved a years subscription as a Christmas gift. For someone like me who is a student and has low money, doesn't get a lot of time to play games and never buys games on release anyway, PS+ is the only thing I need Playstation-wise. It's really good.

PlayStation Plus is really great and I really like it. With that said though I don't know why people insist on comparing it to Xbox Live. They are two very different things. XBox Live is a whole network that runs really well while PS Plus is simply a service where you get to play some games for free as long as you keep paying Sony. Don't forget you lose access to those games if you ever stop being a PS Plus subscriber.

I really do like PS Plus and think it is a tremendous deal. You just can't compare what it is to what Xbox Live is.

I think the reason people compare the two services is because they cost about the same, but they are very different services. Xbox Live Gold is catering to hardcore multiplayer gamers (primarily CoD) with the promise of higher performance online play, whereas Sony are offering an all you can eat buffet of games.

Personally the latter is far more useful to me. For the amount of time I spend playing online each year I just can't justify a £40 Live subscription, especially as (in my experience) PSN works perfectly acceptably for free. Whereas with PS+ I get dozens of free games and free trials for dozens of other games, plus discounts on digital content and some really useful features like cloud storage for my save games and automatic downloading of patches which should really be part of the standard service on all consoles next time around.